Pipes and flak: Where are the journalists?

London, 3 July 2009
By Marius Dragomir

Richard Sambrook: Social media, a challenge (Photo: Marius Dragomir)

Supported by Bloomberg Television, today’s Beyond Broadcasting event in London’s Bloomberg Auditorium was part of the Media Futures Conference 2009, an industry forum.

While reviewing advanced digital production technologies – such as navigation systems for interactive television – the event also included a series of insightful debates about declining standards of media content.

Some gloomy commentators foresaw amateurish ‘produsers’ monopolising the entire range of platforms, while others, more sanguine, believed that demand for quality content would never fade away.

Overall, the great conundrum remains unsolved: how can the new and old media make money in today’s world?

Content, content, content

Good quality content, especially in public service strands, has declined sharply in recent years. The very idea and concept of public service media is experiencing extremely difficult times, said Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and New Media at Channel 4, formerly with the BBC. The main challenge for today’s societies in general, and media in particular, is to revise their system of values. The values we stick to in the media today were shaped in the 1970s. “It is important to see how we reinterpret values,” Locke said. “We have to come up with new ideas and ways of measuring them.”

Melanie Howard, a co-founder of the Future Foundation, a consumer think-tank, said that most consumers don’t realize they are entitled to high quality content, which can only be provided by professionals. The media sector has become extremely competitive, prompting many producers to give away as much content as possible. “This can’t continue, we have to tell people that they have to pay for good content,” said Ms Howard, who has spent 20 years working on social trend analysis. This is equally true about other content-creators, such as filmmakers and musicians.

Future of media money

Toby Syfret, who covers television market developments in the UK and continental Europe for Enders Analysis, presented some recent findings. By June 2009, some 90 per cent of UK households were digital. It is not true that television has lost its edge. Total TV viewing has remained remarkably stable, and younger demographic losses have been offset by older gains. Long-format programmes on TV are still very popular.

However, demand for IPTV on TV sets or PCs remains a niche and is hard to monetise. TV Video-on-Demand is still only wanted by 3 per cent of Virgin Media households. Monetisation of PC video remains problematic, Mr Syfret added.

He said that in 2003, there were three sources for financing television in the UK: the largest was accounted by pay-TV, second largest was advertising and the third licence fee. During these times of crisis, the BBC is recession-proof while pay-TV expands more quickly. The most affected players are the commercial broadcasters which are mostly funded through advertising.

According to Enders Analysis, TV advertising will drop by 26 per cent between 2007 and 2010. By 2013, pay-tv will be growing while advertising falls, though not as fast as licence fees.

Television will rule

Barwise: We don't want to lose journalism (Photo: Marius Dragomir)

Will the media survive in these tough economic conditions? They will, argued Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at the London Business School, on condition that they really understand real customers, “not you and your friends”. The assumption that everybody will switch to video-on-demand is nonsense. The amount of such content can cause congestion on the internet, but it is still really small relative to television consumption.

Local newspapers will not bounce back because the internet has replaced them successfully. However, the internet can’t ever replace traditional television, especially in advertising impact. Although it siphons money away from television, Google hardly meets the needs of most advertisers.

Mr Barwise rubbished the assumption that the internet, and multitasking in media consumption, are for teenagers only. The amount of multitasking, which is a trait of the digital environment, is actually the same for all the people up to the age of 50. Moreover, Ms Howard from Future Foundation said, the population itself is ageing; by 2025 generations of over 50 years will form the bulk of digital consumers.

Many speakers complained about the recent Digital Britain report, prepared by Lord Carter for the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The report only looks at technology, or “the pipes”, although the real problem is lack of content. If we want, for example, to have UK television content of the kind that we have had over the past twenty years or so, which is quality, formatted television, and not bits of blurred and low-brow video on the internet, an industry levy is the solution, preferably to be imposed on recording equipment, Mr Barwise said. “Don’t be fooled by those who say that this is a socialist idea,” he added. It makes sense to tax equipment that records free-of-charge content. For this content has, somehow, to be financed.

Many speakers, mostly those coming from the journalism profession, said that the most urgent challenge is to save professional journalism, particularly at the local level. Citizen journalism is all well and good, but it cannot replace professional journalism. “We want them both,” Mr Barwise said.

Social media

A big challenge for news organisations is their relations with the new social media, said Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s Global News division. However, news organisations that open accounts on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter are doing nothing more than marketing. There is a marketing value to be had, Sambrook said, but nothing much by way of news distribution.

These new forms of socialisation on the internet are powerful, beyond any question, but they cannot replace journalism. Charlie Beckett, the founding director of the LSE-based think-tank Polis, said that crowd-sourcing exercises by The Guardian had helped lead to breaking the story on British MPs’ expenses. But these all remain exercises that can be used by the media now and then, they can never produce a dependable content of a given quality.